for what I want to do, is vt-d needed? as I am really thinking of using my sig rig now.

if you also say that regarding the cpu my current sigs cpu is deff more than enough as well as if is 6 cores....

What the VT-d would do is let you take a NIC and give a VM direct access to it. When you set it up you won't select a Virtual Network...You could give it to the real network. Normally the VM host kind of acts like a middleman bridging the gap and thus slows things down. In a home environment this doesn't usually hurt things much unless you were streaming out three HD videos or something. Like in my home example I have two NICs in my host. One is directly given to the file server VM and I can get network file transfer speeds of about 70MB/s with it on a Gb network. The other NIC is just virtually given to and shared with the other VMs and I only get speeds of around 25-40MB/s. However, that is just with my particular hardware, but VT-d helps out a lot there. Plus the whole GPU pass through is awesome too.

It also makes troubleshooting much easier. That is the main reason why we use in a corporate setting. It isn't needed, but it sure is nice. I'd never virtualize without it now that I've used it.

Oh and I know there are some RAID controllers that will work with VT-d but will not work without it, but they are crappy ones that you don't want to use anywayEdited by Vagrant Storm - 5/16/13 at 10:25am

now I need to start building myself a new rig.
amd with 990fx 8150 with 16 gig of ram sound good?

@vagrantstorm.. you think using a ssd for the base setup is fine... or just a ssd for the other OS's and then a platter hdd for the base?

I am nto to sure on this part as what is best as it will be my first time doing this....

or just get a few 60 gig SSD's for all the VM's? and hdds for the storage in raid 10 or something

I run my ESXi off of a flash drive for starters. Once it is up and running you could remove it even.

Hard drive configuration can be whatever. They will behave just like a bare metal system. An item of note here is that if you add a disk as a data store it will get formatted. Adding a drive with existing data is tricky. I've done it by adding it to my FreeNAS box and then you do a direct mapping to it, but adding it to FreeNAS is really tricky too. I'd just go in planning to format what ever drives you hook up to it.

I run my ESXi off of a flash drive for starters. Once it is up and running you could remove it even.

Hard drive configuration can be whatever. They will behave just like a bare metal system. An item of note here is that if you add a disk as a data store it will get formatted. Adding a drive with existing data is tricky. I've done it by adding it to my FreeNAS box and then you do a direct mapping to it, but adding it to FreeNAS is really tricky too. I'd just go in planning to format what ever drives you hook up to it.

oops.

I am going to have to buy a load of hdds to then.. this is going to be a costly project I see

LOL

I thought I had to install esxi onto a hdd then with in that remote into the machine from another one and install the VM's from there!

what would you recommend to run on the remote pc to control esxi and all vm's please?